The five-beat line

People build games in frameworks that allow some things and disallow others. I’m writing Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright in a set of metrical frameworks that allow some things and disallow others, so I figured a bit of writing to introduce those might find readers.  

I take for my topic today the big one: the five-beat line.  

1.  

I write most of Kin-Bright in lines with five beats—five moments of metrical prominence—and a rising pattern, that is, ‘rising’ from an offbeat to a beat. So, if x represents an offbeat and / a  beat, x/x/x/x/x/.  

This pattern, sometimes called ‘iambic pentameter’, squats like a giant toad over the most recent third of English poetry’s history. It emerged in the late fourteenth century, probably from the previously French-influenced Chaucer getting high on the Italian endecasillabo. In the sixteenth century poets codified it as English’s prestige metre, a role it held into the twentieth century. Shakespeare, Wroth, Milton, Behn, Dryden, Egerton, Pope, Radcliffe, Wordsworth, Barrett Browning, and Tennyson all wrote poems in it; as Eliot would’ve known, there’re lines in ‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land that work as orthodox five-beat units:  

        Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels  

The simplest route to an orthodox five-beat line is to arrange all the words so that their natural lexical stresses fall on the beats:  

        Of armours vast and woman lone I sing  

Once an audience’s brains have clipped on to the metre, though, you can put words which in normal speech wouldn’t necessarily generate a stress in a beat position, and let the audience do the rest:  

        and in the back his beaten god he bears,  

Here, ‘in’ might well not be stressed in normal speech, but takes on a beat because lots of preceding lines have had a x/x/x/x/x/ pattern, so the brain slaps the same pattern over this line too. You can even do this with inflections:

        With sacral flourishes in flurry quick  

Only rarely in normal speech does one need to stress the final syllable of flourishes, but it can serve as a beat if I want it to.  

2.  

What the brain sneakingly wants is a four-beat line. Like:  

        their fleet a price most costly paid  

Lines with four metrical prominences dominated the first two-thirds of the history of English poetry—in two different metrical systems, alliterative and alternating. Even recent centuries have probably produced more lines of four-beat verse than five-beat verse, because the four-beat line (and its derivative, the septenary) dominates in popular verse and in song.  

Four-beat lines satisfy in part because they divide neatly:  

        our god went forth | in power and might  

(I’m afraid in my version of English power can be one or two syllables.) This satisfying division remains true even in totally different metrical systems:  

        and here garlands they gathered | so to gaud weddings  

The brain’s desire for a four-beat line sets up one of the main sources of pleasure in the five-beat line: breaking it up. You can split a five-beat line after three beats, for three-two:  

        I burn to muster troops, | to storm the horse (3|2)  

Or after two, for two-three:  

        Back down I leap, | and hit the house alarm (2|3)  

Or you can write what’s secretly a four-beat line, with an appendage:  

        askew, || and in her hands—|those hands so firm (1||2|2)  

        t’outpace my city’s | hurtling fate. || To fringe (2|2||1)  

I use two-three and three-two as my most common ways to divide the line up, and the four-beat-line-plus-appendage option more rarely.  

You can have the syntax march in lockstep with the five-beat line, so that each metrical line is a statement:  

        With speeding tread through family park I haste,
        on course preferring thickest-wooded parts.
        I thumb through frequencies and airwaves plumb.
        The jammed and shattered channels yield no speech.
        That state itself a grim-voiced tale can tell:  

Or you can uncouple syntax from the metrical line-divisions, and let them run in counterpoint, which often entails lines running on (‘enjambment’):  

        A broad, ungainly silhouette up-rose
        atop the facing crest, with fighter cloud
        attendant: generator vast, below
        a set of edges horned and points grotesque  

At their simplest these techniques offer ways to avoid monotony, but you can also use them to do things like conveying (say) measured reflection versus rapid, staccato speech.  

3.  

So far I’ve discussed methods of variation which leave the x/x/x/x/x/ pattern unchanged. But I also use some which tweak the pattern.  

The simplest of these, so small it doesn’t really count, is the so-called metrically-feminine ending, in which an extra offbeat hangs on the line’s end:  

        to catch each fluctuation trace or murmur
        of folded space the moment might deliver.  

These used to be more common, but modern English poetry generally avoids these endings, and Kin-Bright does too, for the most part. I use them in a few places for particular purposes.  

Much more significant variations happen earlier in the line, in keeping with the ‘principle of closure’ that seems common across most formed verse in (at least) Indo-European languages: that metre varies less as the line continues.  

When syntax splits a line up at any point before the fourth beat, I’m willing to have one offbeat either side of the break:  

        sees Hall-Deep as a father, | and now is here. (x/x/x/x|x/x/)  

        And now for Moon-Word, with anxious speed I seek. (x/x/x|x/x/x/)  

Finally, two ways to move the first beat to the very start of the line. You can ‘invert’ the opening beat and offbeat for a /xx/x/x/x/ pattern:  

        palaces proud, and temples, gardens, towers  

Or, you can drop the first offbeat whole, for a ‘headless’ /x/x/x/x/ pattern: 

        Nowhere in this city’s wreck, my wife.

This (I think) tends to achieve a little more emphasis.